The Bali bombing anniversary had officially calmed the nightclub drag. The road was closed to traffic. Police clumped around cars and security screenings like big kids (with big guns) around a Game Boy.

The quiet wouldn't last, of course - even the bombings themselves did not check Kuta's long-term prospects as a party hotspot - but the lockdown might have been expected to run past 11.08pm, the now traditional minute of silence when two bombs detonated and 202 people were doomed.

The problem? It didn't.

Bali memorialSource:Getty Images

Those Aussies who sought reflection instead faced an onslaught of logistical challenges. This was meant to be intimate gathering, a few beers, perhaps, and definitely a few tears.

Here were the Kingsley Football Club players, say, chatting quietly on about the spot at the Sari Club site where they lost seven mates in 2002. Here was Craig Salvatori weeping in a private embrace for his lost wife Kathy.

No Australians at the scene knew why police opened the road just before 10pm. Or why the police had parked their cars, vans and buses on the Sari Club site, which relatives claim as "sacred ground".

In previous years, some victims have planted themselves where loved ones died. Such simple pursuits would be impossible this time around.

Worse, the commemorations, which culminate in the lighting of 88 candles, each pasted with a photo of a fallen Australian, lurched into farce when the police decided to remove their vehicles after the candles were first laid out.

Then local motorcyclists, used to assuming the site was an operating car park, started to demand to be able to park there.

Then police decided to move more vehicles before the candles could be re-laid. The nearby nightclubs, freed of volume controls, had already cranked up their volume knobs, as they do every other night, to 11.

Aussie organisers, led by Maria Kotronakis, who lost two sisters and two cousins in the bombings, wouldn't be put off. The gathering got its minute's silence, despite the whistles and bass beats and street clamours, in a ceremony touching for its simplicity.

Bill Hardy, father of Billy, who died in the Sari Club, offered a brief tribute. That he did so clasping a stubbie of Bintang beer seemed right.

MemorialSource:News Limited

By 11.40pm, as two men walked the site explaining to their partners how they escaped the inferno, the first motorbikes were being parked in the Sari Club car park.

Kuta might be slowed, briefly, but the Kuta party is also Kuta business. It can't be stopped.

Relatives and victims of the bombing want the site bought and recast as a peace park. The idea has understandably garnered high-powered support.

Yet it's hard to imagine such serenity in what might be one of the loudest stretches of real estate in the southern hemisphere.

Harder yet is imagining the site, all dust and rubbish and neglect, being anything grander than a car park for a long some time yet.